Miniaturized on-body patch antenna for 430MHz wireless digestive monitoring system

Biomedical and health applications are representing nowadays a very attractive area for electronics devices. The state of the art shows a multitude of solutions based on in body sensors devices to measure and survey human physiological parameters enabling a distance medical monitoring systems and higher out-of-hospital care services for patients. These emergent systems have a lot of challenges related to their power consumption, size and complexity. In this article, we focus on one of the technological locks of the electronic gastric pill, which is the antenna. A miniaturized patch antenna a key element of the receiving system is presented. The antenna size and performances are very important to consider as it have to be integrated on a jacket in order to collect the transmitted information from an electronic gastric pill to trace cartography of the collected data. Different miniaturization techniques of patch antennas are combined with the use high dielectric constant substrate in order to reach a tradeoff between the antenna performances and the size. The designed antenna resonates in the desired ISM frequency band (430 MHz) and was simulated and optimized with the presence of a model of the human body for a more realistic use case. The antenna size reduction achieves 81.56% with good performances in terms of gain (-29.4dB).